Here’s hoping Texas will follow.
Governor Abbott, are you listening?
Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
251–260 of 282 posts
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful. How would that work? You'd be getting up at like 3:30AM in the Summer for no reason. That far North there's no way to avoid it being mostly light in the Summer and mostly dark in…
It will be 7:00AM, not 3:30AM. Mid-summer in Stocholm the sunset will be at 1:30 and the sunrise at 7:00. And 1000 miles south in Sarajevo clocks will be 1h30 behind, because by the time the Sun rises (at 7:00 local time) it will be already 8:30 in Stockholm...
Yes, but in reality you'd have to adjust +/- 4 hours to keep waking up at the same time... All to have the sunset at a radically different time. I don't see what benefit that gives you and it would involve a ton of work/annoyances.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#253One thing that DST discussions on HN always omit is that not everyone works as a software engineer with a reasonably flexible culture and a 10AM start culture. People who work at coffee shops, retail stores, foodservice prep, etc. often need to be working by 5 or 6AM, they’re just not as politically powerful as the wealthy who have schedule flexibility. They often have 2+ hour commutes on public transportation, and permanent DST means they’ll be working an extra hour in the dark (they already start work in darkness) and will be in bed when it’s still light out.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
As nice as that would be for code, people would still be left with trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances. The utility provided by time zones is a function for us to take our local time and determine whether or not we're interrupting someone's evening or sleep. Not to mention, travel alarm clocks everywhere would need to be sold with a book of "reasonable waking times"…
> trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up. Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the mornin…
Wouldn’t you have the same problem of availability though? The issue is not whether the meeting time is the middle of the night - you can do the same thing now by saying the meeting is at 4pm EST and not being concerned about what time it is elsewhere. Making the time UTC everywhere doesn’t resolve that a person in Japan at the same UTC time simply will not attend the meeting because they’re asleep at that time. Switching to UTC everywhere simply changes the question form what time is it there? To are they asleep or awake there? It doesn’t seem like this makes the scheduling aspect easier because regardless of what the clock says you always have to ask the availability question.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree we should just pick one and move on. The one thing that gets forgotten is that noon was picked based on highest sun point (for some latitude) which is fine until we start to have a generally accepted day as 8-5. Noon is no longer in the middle of that day. It probably makes the most sense to just split the difference between EST and EDT and call it ENT (normalized) and never change again. This doesn't swing w…
Daylight savings time was not put in place to make noon the middle of the day. It was put in place specifically to move noon earlier in the (physical) day. Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle o…
You’ve completely misread. No one thinks DST was made to align noon with the sun. I mean, it’s so obvious that’s not the case (noon is aligned with the sun in Standard Time), I can’t believe you would think it was said that way, especially on this site.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you want to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish
This isn't actually discussing abolition of time zones---it's discussing going from ~24 time zones to having only 1 time zone. It essentially maximizes the errors inherent in having a finite number of time zones for an infinite number of locations on the planet. Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete. Now when somebody says "It's noon" we kno…
That’s going to make catching your train or plane or trying to do multiple transport connections a nightmare. What time do I have to leave my house driving east to catch the 7pm flight? And note the clocks will change as you drive making it hard to understand if you’re late or not. It also assumes everyone has a device that does this work for you, which would be really tough to work around when it runs out of battery.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Daylight savings time was not put in place to make noon the middle of the day. It was put in place specifically to move noon earlier in the (physical) day. Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle o…
You’ve completely misread. No one thinks DST was made to align noon with the sun. I mean, it’s so obvious that’s not the case (noon is aligned with the sun in Standard Time), I can’t believe you would think it was said that way, especially on this site.
The alternative way to read it seems to be “here’s an irrelevant bit of data about the concept of noon, followed by an irrelevant proposal to shift time zones by a half an hour for essentially no reason”. I’m not sure that’s better.
Also, noon is not really aligned with the sun in standard time. In some rough sense, sure. But solar noon on one side of a time zone is an hour before/after solar noon on the other side. The nature of time zones scoped to hour blocks guarantees that clock noon will not correspond to solar noon in most of the zone. This is especially true for larger zones like China’s official zone.
> especially on this site
Because everyone on this site is a super genius and never miscommunicates.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
You only have the cultural expectation of "always get up at 7am" because of the insane timezone system. If sunrise changes throughout the year, changing the time you wakeup is the natural answer. Having an obtuse and indecipherable timekeeping system instead is insane. The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put ever…
I'm with you when you say to get up at 5 in summer and 7 in winter, but putting everyone on UTC, now that's really insane. The people in Australia aren't going to eat lunch at 12 so-called midnight.
No, they wouldn't, they would eat lunch in the middle of their day, which would be centered around the times the sun rises and sets. Just like how days work everywhere pretty much. They just would know what those times are where they live naturally, and know that they can schedule a conference call with someone in London without getting the time off by +/-2 hours depending on if they do the time zone changes properly, know the time zone the other person will be in at the time, know if they are in or out of DST at the same time, etc.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#259I don’t get the downright hatred that some have for DST. If we were perpetually on winter time, then at my latitude during the summer the sun would rise at 5 in the morning which is too early for many people. If we were to be perpetually on summer time, then in winter the sun will not rise until after 8, with people starting to work before the sun came up. Is there something wrong with wanting the sun to come up at a…
The sun will rise at "5 in the morning" no matter what time your clock says it is. You could always, instead of changing time itself , just set your alarm an hour earlier or later. If your clocks go back an hour but you keep your alarm the same you are still getting up an hour earlier. You just made things way more complicated than they needed to be in the process.
But that isn't true if my company tells me "you have to work between this hour and that hour". I can change my alarms till the cows come home but it means nothing. Moreover, the majority can have an effect on what government we have, but we can't have an effect on what business decisions are. Because business leaders are a small subset of the community. If they naturally have an interest in not setting separate working hours summer and winter and employees naturally do have an interest in setting separate working hours summer and winter, the only plausible mechanism available to the employees (who need to work if they want to feed their family and can't afford to gratuitously quit in the hope of finding a job that doesn't exist) is to change the clocks.
You're not obliged to follow us. If you don't like daylight savings, you can set your own alarms in the summer and winter differently. It will be no harder for you to do that than it will be for me to do that. If it was as trivial as you make it out to be, you wouldn't even utter a breath in complaint because it would be so easy for you to do it that you just wouldn't notice. But social realities mean that changing the clocks is the best route available to us, and so that's what our societies have settled on.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people don't choose their working hours.
Do you think they could and/or should do so? what's stopping them from making that kind of choice where the hours of daylight after work are vitally important to them?
Well anyone for whom daylight hours after work is vitally important is either dead or they have made that kind of choice.
As for the rest of us, for whom sunlight after work is a nice-to-have, Generally speaking, we are employees of companies who set their work hours based on who-knows-what and not based on my desire for entertainment. If I like watching daytime tv, they don't say "and you can have a two hour lunch break".
The people who set clock time are subject to my vote. The pepole who set working hours are not.
It would definitely better if employees had more power than they do now but I think the solution of daylight savings is adequate and I wouldn't want to waste my bargaining power on something when we already have a solution that works well.